[tech-spec] Re: R arguments

From: Tom McCubbin <tmccubbin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

To: tech-spec@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 12:15:25 -0400

Dirk, we need to meet one day. I indeed have blob'd into Postgres, but
haven't used the 'R inside Postgres' project.
My reasons are several fold. The datasets i use have historically been
somewhat large. On the order of a billion timeseries, each w/
thousands of points in time and sometimes a great number more. Postgres
simply couldn't handle it. That is not a naysay against postgres...a
brilliant DBMS pioneering new concepts like inheritance of schemas...i
went up agains Oracle at Credit Suisse, and the result was the same.
Secondly, when dealing w/ timeseries of disparate frequencies, SQL has
no concept of time. Yes, they have a timestamp, or date, but no ability
to natively understand vectors of observations at a given frequency, nor
the ability to rescale to different frequencies. For me, this has been
a plain and simple must.
Thirdly, dealing with large datasets means terse storage, one which no
indexed RDBMS supports. disks are cheaper, but i need to get a 20 year
daily timeseries instantiated from disk in sub-millisecond timings to
support large model runs that would otherwise span days...for a single
days run. (NOTE: all of these 'super models' are of course worthless
and waisting good computing time that this group could probably put to
better use! But they are the clients that pay my bills )
now...off my soap box...and thanks! i will definitely check this out.
-tom
ps - on gentoo, its one emerge away! ( i too am a penguin guy ...but
lets not start a religious debate on distros :)
Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>I promise that I will get off this soap box one day, but ...
>
>
>... in this context, had you heard of Joe Conway's clever 'R inside of
>PostgreSQL' project of R as a procedural language for the Postgres SQL DBMS?
>On Debian, it's just one 'apt-get install' away. See
>
> http://www.joeconway.com/plr/
>
>Dirk
>
>
>